On Cultural Revolutions: Observations on Myth and History in Turkey

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ Nur Yalman On Cultural Revolutions: observations on myth and history in Turkey Goody Lecture 2017 Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia’ Nur Yalman On Cultural Revolutions: observations on myth and history in Turkey Goody Lecture 2017 Jack Goody (1919–2015) Sir John Rankine Goody was brought up near London and initially studied English at Cambridge. Formative experiences during the Second World War led him to switch to social anthropology. He undertook fieldwork in Northern Ghana during the last dec- ade of British colonial rule and taught anthropology at Cambridge University alongside Meyer Fortes and Edmund Leach. After succeeding Fortes as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in 1973, he began to explore long-term historical contrasts between sub-Saharan African societies and those of Europe and Asia. Following V. Gordon Childe, Goody emphasized commonalities across the Eurasian landmass since the urban revolution of the Bronze Age. In numerous publications he highlighted developments in East Asia and criticised the eurocentric bias of Western historians and social theo- rists. Core themes include productive systems, the transmission of property and class inequality in global history; kinship, marriage and the “domestic domain”; technologies of communication, especially writing, the transmission of myth, and of knowledge gen- erally; and consumption, including cuisine and flowers. These topics are not approached in isolation but in their interconnections. Ethnographic insights are essential, but they form just one component of Goody’s comparative vision. His best known works include Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962); Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (1971); Production and Reproduction (1976); The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977); The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983); The Oriental, The Ancient and the Primitive (1990); The East in the West (1996); The Theft of His- tory (2006); Renaissances: the one or the many? (2010); The Eurasian Miracle (2010); Metals, Culture and Capitalism: an essay on the origins of the modern world (2012). Goody’s agenda is one which the Department ‘Resilience and Transformation in Eura- sia’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology seeks to continue. In an annual lecture series, a distinguished scholar addresses pertinent themes for anthropology and related fields: Goody Lecture 2011: Keith Hart, “Jack Goody’s Vision of World History and African Development Today”. Goody Lecture 2012: Peter Burke, “A Case of Cultural Hybridity: the European Renaissance”. Goody Lecture 2013: Martha Mundy, “The Solace of the Past in the Unspeakable Present: the historical anthropology of the ‘Near East’”. Goody Lecture 2014: Francesca Bray, “Rice as Self: food, history and nation-building in Japan and Malaysia”. Goody Lecture 2015: David Wengrow, “Cities before the State in Early Eurasia”. Goody Lecture 2016: Martine Segalen, “On Papies and Mammies: the invention of a new relative in contemporary European kinship”. The seventh Goody Lecture was given by Nur Yalman on 11th May 2017. Nur Yalman On Cultural Revolutions: observations on myth and history in Turkey It is a special pleasure for me to be speaking at the Max Planck Institute here in Halle. My first visit to Germany was in 1950 on my way to Cambridge. I had always spoken German as a child in Istanbul. I was stunned by the destruction of the war that I witnessed at the time. Since then I have had only rare occa- sions to return. The experience of a united and free Germany, and the rekindled vitality of German humanism as well as science, despite many challenges, are matters of profound personal satisfaction. Jack Goody and I go back a long time. I arrived in Cambridge as an undergradu- ate fresh from Istanbul in September 1950. Istanbul had been lovely in the late summer. I had just graduated from a superb school, Robert College, and was full of curiosity to study anthropology, in order to understand mankind. Little did I know what a heady adventure this would turn out to be. Jack had just returned from fieldwork in Ghana. He was working on his PhD with Meyer Fortes, newly appointed as William Wyse Professor of Anthropology. We also had Kathleen Gough, who had returned from South India, full of the most exot- ic information on marriage systems among the Nayar and the Nambudiri Brah- man castes. Jack Goody and Kathleen Gough were among my early supervisors at Cambridge.1 I eventually went on to follow their lead and do two years of very intensive field work in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Since those early experiences I have maintained a deep interest in the enticing civilization of greater India. 1 Others I recall well from my years in Cambridge include Derrick Stenning (Fulani), Raymond Smith (Caribbean), Derek Freeman (Borneo), all back from field work, and younger research students, Jean La Fontaine, Fredrik Barth, Anthony Forge, Ralph Bulmer, Malcolm Ruel, John Blacking, Martin Southwold, Maurice Bloch, Marilyn Strathern and Andrew Strathern, all of whom went on to distinguished careers. 4 Two things impressed me about Jack Goody. He was greatly interested in myth, and also in African history. He had been working on the LoDagaa myths in Northern Ghana. He was also very open to other cultures, with a genuine sense of empathy – the essential trait of an anthropologist. I was able to talk to him extensively about my home country, Turkey. Turkey had undergone an extraordinary cultural revolution in the years when I was growing up. Its full significance as a historical phenomenon had not dawned on me at the time. I first discussed matters of culture change with Jack at a time when Western post-colonial attitudes towards other cultures, including India, China, Africa, and their uneven interaction throughout history, were already beginning to engage him.2 Cambridge was a stable and charmed oasis with traditions reaching back into the Middle Ages. Istanbul, where I had come from, was seething with mo- mentous ideas – as it still is. The ancient Ottoman Empire had been destroyed in the great bonfire of empires in 1918. A new dynamic republic was estab- lished, and a single party regime gave way to open democratic elections in 1950. A new party, the Democratic Party, was in power. The future was full of hope. Turkey had taken her place among the progressive countries of Western Europe. Nothing could stop ambitious young Turks now that democracy and freedom were in place. My heady Cambridge adventure had begun. I would stay at Cambridge for the next ten years in various capacities. Appiah and the Case of Turkey The changing relations between East and West that so engaged Goody in his later years were recently the subject of a brilliant series of lectures by Kwame Anthony Appiah on the BBC. It is surely fitting that an intellectual from the Royal House of Ashanti in Ghana, so close to the regions where Jack Goody worked, now a distinguished professor at New York University, should con- 2 Goody, Jack. 1996. The East in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Goody, Jack. 2000. The power of the written tradition. London: The Smithsonian Institution Press; Goody, Jack. 2003. Islam in Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press; Goody, Jack. 2006. The theft of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Goody, Jack. 2010. Renaissances: the one or the many. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5 tribute searching ideas to the subject of relations between cultures.3 Appiah has highly original, very anthropological, views on the perennial subjects of mistaken identities: creed, country, colour, and culture. The Guardian announced his lecture with some flourish under the headline: “There is no such thing as Western Civilization”. You may think that this is rather simple and unsurprising coming from an African likely to have very ambivalent feelings towards the long centuries of European oppression in Africa. But you would be mistaken. Appiah approaches the subject of Western Civilization with engaging subtlety. He traces the origin of the concept of the West, that hardly made any sense until recent times. One could not speak of the high ideals of human rights, democracy, liberty, and the rule of law in a Western Civilization in which European powers were slaughtering each other with incalculable savagery, during the many wars on the continent. So, when does it make sense to speak of Western Civilization at all? It could be argued that it only makes sense in very recent times, with the establishment of the European Union and the great hopes raised for human rights, for personal freedom of expression and association, and for the European Court of Justice. Appiah’s conclusion is that these lofty ideas are hopes shared by many persons from utterly different backgrounds. They do not simply belong to the West. For Appiah, these traditions of the West are only ours if we care about them: “A culture of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry: that would be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a western destiny.” My own experience, both European and Asian, bears out Ap- piah. The desire for open political systems is a very potent current that is being challenged and hampered by well entrenched conservative ideologies. The political struggle for rights is familiar all around the world. These political yearnings resonate very powerfully with the recent experience of explosive cultural discord in Turkey. There is a huge desire for personal democratic liberties, just as Appiah describes them. These are frustrated by an increasingly intolerant authoritarian regime with very ambivalent attitudes towards the West. This great frustration has now found its most precise public expression in the recent referendum for a new constitution in Turkey.

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